Still useless
Still no explanation of how this is supposed to be anything other than a pure marketing ploy: "Mozilla Works Harder to Keep You Safe!"
Mozilla has uploaded a working prototype of its "Do Not Track" http header into the Firefox nightly builds. Anyone interested in testing the header can do so by downloading a pre-beta version of Firefox, but it won't have any real effect until websites and advertisers chose to recognize the thing. Mozilla proposed such a …
Online security and privacy issues are a major problem and Mozilla throwing their hat in the ring with this announcement is hardly a marketing ploy. Microsoft has already made similar press releases about this with IE, and also Google with Chrome. The aspect that is 'useless' is all three parties are focusing on fixes for their own environments instead of collaborating on a common, universal solution. There's a detailed explanation by Steve Gibson on a recent, "Security Now" podcast.
http://twit.tv/sn285
I can't see the point. Surely this will have very limited effects. Aren't most places that are dodgy enough to track you also dodgy enough that they won't give a toss about this header?
OK, so some companies like Google will probably obey it, but the privacy nutters will already have blocked the cookies from these well known and better behaved advert-vendors.
The resounding reply was, surprise surprise, it won't work.
People seem to forget that for most websites that do tracking, we're not the customer, we're the product. The customers are the advertisers, and websites are selling us to them.
But then, that's a difficult as expecting football fans to understand that it's not a sport to the clubs, but business*, and that they don't care about fans hating the new American owners of the day.
* Had to get the jab in there following this morning's papers being full of transfer "news"
This is my reasoning as an advertiser and website owner:
My website is free for the users and my money comes from ads (users can opt out from ads with a small paid subscription), therefor ad companies are my customers and I'm selling them users that click on their ads. If a user doesn't want ads then he is not earning me money (he has no value to the advertising company) and I don't even want him on my website! Why give him something free if he doesn't even both to view ads (not necessarily click - all I want is an honest chance of showing him something he could be interested in)?
If advertising companies go with this, this thing only cheats webmasters from their hard earned clicks. It stands to reason that I would then either only work with ad companies that ignore this crap, or I would ban users that have this in their header. To me they are freeriders.
They propose this on some blog, which nobody outside geek circles reads, and it won't have any effect until world+dog changes their web site? In particular, it requires the advertisers, against whose very interest this is, to cooperate?
Somebody has seriously lost sync with reality here.
not that $TRACKINGWEBSITE can ignore your preferences anyway, it's that they could no longer claim you gave any kind of implied consent to their tracking.
And if they write code to explicitly ignore your lack of consent, then they can't claim to have been ignorant of how you chose to communicate your views.
The best they can say is "Oh? I never heard of that header before!" ... which is a pretty feeble response.